Category Archives: sitting

12 states of attention

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Update: This post was originally written in 2010, and it’s now 2023. Some things have changed. I’ve met and taken several trainings with Nelson. He’s a crusty, lovable curmudgeon and very, very smart.

You can find Nelson’s archived Navaching website here.

You can get a new or used copy of his book The Structure of Delight on Amazon.

If you’re a fan of Nelson Zink and in particular his work on peripheral vision and nightwalking, you might be interested in attending a nightwalking training in Taos, New Mexico, with Katie Raver. Details here.

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My most recent post, Refining Awareness, includes some instructions about using your vision to focus down to the pixel level, and then to open your vision and let everything come into your field of vision.

These activities are based on a set of exercises called the 12 states of attention that I learned about and practiced and taught, so that now I seem to have internalized them enough that I don’t consciously think about it.

The three main senses we use are seeing, hearing, and feeling, or visual, auditory, and kinesthetic. NLP 101.

Each of these senses can be experienced externally and internally. For example, I can see the computer in front of me, and I can close my eyes and remember the image or imagine the computer morphing into a piano. That’s Visual External and Visual Internal (remembered and constructed).

You can further expand your sensory acuity by practicing using each sense as broadly and as narrowly as possible. Hence, look at a pixel, then let everything come in. Those states are Visual External Narrow (VEN) and Visual External Broad (VEB).

You can do this with hearing as well. You can focus on one sound in your environment (or in your memory or imagination), and you can focus on all the sounds.

Same with kinesthetic awareness. Internal, external, narrow, broad.

A man I’ve never met but who has been a teacher for me came up with the 12 states of attention. His name is Nelson Zink, and he’s got a pretty amazing website, Navaching. Click here to read about the 12 states of attention. He’s got a lot to say and says it well. (And check out his other pages. It’s pretty fascinating. I also do nightwalking. And read his book, The Structure of Delight.)

The point is that through our conditioning, most of us come to favor some states and neglect others. If you enjoy having more resources, you can practice these states and gain awareness skills. You never have to be bored again, and you will reach more of your potential!

So when I meditate and do a body scan, I may bring to awareness my skin, starting with my head and slowly going down my body to my foot, bringing each area into awareness (Kinesthetic External Narrow).

Or I may attend to how my head, chest, and belly feel (Kinesthetic Internal Somewhere-Between-Narrow-and-Broad).

When I do whole body awareness, I am using the Kinesthetic Internal/External Broad state of attention, including my energy field.

(The convention is that the skin is the boundary between external and internal for the kinesthetic sense. But because my energy body radiates through my skin, my skin is a permeable boundary, and I’m sensing internally and externally at the same time.)

The kinesthetic sense may actually be a lot of senses, including balance, knowing where my foot is in space, temperature, tactile, muscular, and so on. Emotions are usually classified as kinesthetic as well, since we feel them in the body.

Anyway.

Wisdom is a broad state, no matter whether we’re seeing the big picture, hearing the cosmic OM, or feeling connected to Source. Big Mind is a broad state, and that’s a skill gained from meditation.

Check out Zink’s website and practice the exercises given, if you like. It will bring you gifts of knowing yourself and experiencing more of your full potential.

My yoga page on this blog

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Just letting y’all know… If you’re curious about my yoga classes, look under the banner photo, and you’ll see a row of links to pages. Click “Private yoga classes” to go there. Or just click here.

I just noticed yesterday in my blog stats that it had only been clicked three times.

I’ve finished the class part of my yoga teacher training and have a humongous test to do on my own time, as well as lesson plans for my 12-class series, Beginner’s Yoga, Beginner’s Mind, currently getting ready for the 9th week, to turn in.

I’ll post more about the Oak Hill restorative yoga class when it’s all worked out. Right now I’m focusing on the test and lesson plans.

I’ll let you know when I officially finish my training, and we’ll celebrate!

Emptiness in fullness

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Just because it’s been awhile since I posted about how my meditation practice is going, and that’s the main reason for this blog, here’s an update.

A few weeks ago, something happened that I wrote about in a post, Sitting, Yoga, Oh, Yeah, and Breakthroughs. I experienced something new to me in meditation. Read the post if you like.

That experience felt familiar. Associations popped up about being a young child and having to take a nap (so our mother could take a nap) and lying on my bed awake, aware but not identified with myself.

I had that experience then. Several times. So present, peaceful, open, and unattached! Empty, and yet somehow sparkling with aliveness.

I have yearned for this state to recur.

I’ve tried to figure out how I got there, and all I can say is it seems to have something to do with perspective, like those figure-ground drawings where you see either an old woman or a young woman. You can train yourself to see both.

Or it has something to do with what’s known in NLP as “chunk size.” We all have a preferred chunk size. There’s an expansion into new awareness going on here. Maybe it’s what Buddhism calls “Big Mind.”

Or both of these are happening at the same time. Or something entirely different. Small Mind likes to have something to do!

Anyway, I have no skill with this! I found the state effortlessly and luckily, and then another state arose. And I haven’t returned, either with effort or without, so far.

So after a bit, I just gave up the desire. It will happen again when it happens. Or not.

Much of my experience of whole body awareness has become about experiencing fullness. Adyashanti spoke about this last night in his first satsang in Austin, saying his meditation teacher called it “the fullest emptiness you’ll ever experience.” (That was a very nice event. I hope he returns.)

I don’t know if it’s the fullest emptiness I’ll ever experience, but I recognize experiencing fullness in emptiness. It’s a presence, a way of being, and it seems to be at or near the core of my being. And it doesn’t seem to have boundaries. And awareness of it strengthens it.

And it’s good! Or, rather, it’s goodness!

About Effortless Wellbeing

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Note: Earlier this post mistakenly called this book Effortless Meditation. The actual name of the book is Effortless Wellbeing.

Elephantjournal.com posted this article a day or two ago. Being someone who appreciates simplicity and elegance, I found it very worth sharing. Read the article here.

A man named Evan Finer has written a little book called Effortless Wellbeing. The author of the post, Bob Weisenberg, writes that in his effort to boil meditation down to its essentials, Finer came up with three key skills:

  1. Relaxing the body.
  2. Learning to breathe smoothly and naturally.
  3. Calming the mind by learning to focus.

Notice you don’t have to be sitting on a zafu with your eyes closed to use these skills!

Weisenberg states,

…there are few things in life which cannot be enhanced by relaxing your body, breathing more naturally, and gently focusing your mind.

Weisenberg goes on to list nine techniques for focusing the mind.

Body awareness is one of them, although it doesn’t mention whole body awareness. I really enjoyed getting perspective about my meditation technique, that it’s one of nine ways to focus the mind. Whole body awareness, preceded by a body scan, is working for me very well.

Comments?

Oh, yeah, one more skill!

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In my post yesterday about the skill developed for/during meditation, I forgot to mention the skill of returning! This is used when my monkey mind starts thinking, “Hmm, I’ll need to leave work early to get there on time tonight… I wonder if I’ll have time to change clothes… I can wear my new top… Who’s going to be there? I need to go to the grocery store too…” in the middle of meditation. I need to return my attention to the present moment, to my teacher’s directive, whole body awareness.

I have done this so often that I found tremendous value in putting my intent into words when I first sit down to meditate. Then when my mind strays, I bring it back to that anchored intent:

May my mind become steady with whole body awareness.

By the way, that act of gently and lovingly returning one’s wandering mind back to the present moment and to whole body awareness activates a small area between the limbic mid-brain and the frontal cortex called the anterior cingulate cortex, the ACC for short.

The ACC has to do with regulating emotions and behavior, as you might have guessed from its location. It appears that activating the ACC results in lower levels of the stress hormone cortisol, and lower levels of anxiety, depression, anger, fatigue, and pain sensitivity. In other words, more calm, happiness, acceptance, alertness, and pleasure!

And who doesn’t want that?

You may be wondering how I get my monkey mind to cooperate. I tell it that later it can think and wander all it wants to, but right now during meditation is not the time. Notice I don’t tell monkey mind that it’s bad for interrupting. It’s like a two-year-old sometimes! Redirect, redirect, redirect!!!

Developing the skills of meditation

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I was thinking today, three-quarters through my year of daily sitting, about skills that I have developed so far.

It took about three months for me to be able to sit for 30 minutes without spending a good chunk of that time being aware of some pain somewhere in my body. Usually it wasn’t major pain, though, but sometimes the pain seemed to accumulate during a session, and right before the timer would go off, I’d start feeling like I couldn’t stand it any more.

That probably doesn’t count as a real skill. It’s more like acclimating the body to the practice. It felt like grace when the pain (mostly) went away.

Most of the pain was around my sacrum and left sacroiliac joint, where I’ve had injury. Whatever. Do not let this stop you from meditating. You will not experience pain like I did. Yours will be different. And you will learn from it. Unjudged, pain is sensation, pure and simple.

It also takes core strength to be able to keep my spine erect for 30 minutes while unsupported. I had this ability before I started sitting, developed from both yoga and sitting on an exercise ball with my back unsupported at my job.

If you’re thinking of starting a sitting practice, it’s a good idea to work on your core strength.

Another skill for physically sitting is knowing that your knees should be lower than your pelvis. I have used a round zafu, a crescent zafu, folded yoga blankets, and a yoga bolster to create this posture.

The physical skills of a sitting practice are far easier to describe than the awareness skills.

I’ve posted quite a bit about how I’ve been given the instruction “whole body awareness” by my Zen meditation teacher, and my various explorations of how to do that. It’s been a koan — something you try to “figure out” but can’t, and meanwhile you pay of attention to your actual experience.

One of the things I’m recognizing now is that being able to shift between what’s in the foreground of my attention (hearing a siren outside) to what’s in the background (hearing everything I can hear — the siren, traffic sounds, a helicopter, birds, squirrels, conversations, my refrigerator, my breathing, my cat purring, my tinnitus) is a skill developed in meditation.

Hearing everything I hear without labeling it: another skill to practice. Let it all in and be unnamed!

To further develop meditation skill, you can take that ability to move from narrow to wide from one sense (hearing) and include another sense, such as touch.

Expand to include your other senses: what you see (even with your eyes closed, unless you are sitting in pitch darkness, some light comes through your closed eyelids, smell, and taste.

Include your thoughts and your emotional state.

Let your senses blend with each other. Let them merge. Keep moving between the foreground and background, from narrow to broad awareness.

Another skill of meditation has to do with size or location, perspective or point of view. This is the hardest thing for me to write about right now, because I’m exploring a new edge of my sitting experience.

When I first started trying to become aware of my whole body after months of my attention being drawn to body parts that either hurt or felt good, I had to learn how to “back off”.

To become aware of my whole body, I had to somehow enlarge my awareness.

Now, that’s not something you hear often. “Hey, you, enlarge your awareness!”

At first I though this meant taking in less detail to get a bigger “picture”. It’s not that the detail goes away. I can zoom back in, so to speak. And it’s not visual, and not like a camera. Those are metaphors.

Here lately, I have experienced backing off even further, to where I experience whole awareness — aware of my body as an just another artifact of my nervous system, not really “my body”. Meanwhile, my nervous system is taking in everything.

There is not a clear way for me to tell you how to “back off” in meditation. It’s like I stumbled upon it by accident, and at this point, I don’t quite know what I did, but I do know that I experienced an interesting shift.

Maybe by the end of this year, I can be more clear. I appreciate you readers who bear with me in this exploration. I think we are getting some nuggets out of it.

And when you can let all of your awareness of the background become the foreg

“Dear God, I’m in trouble” moments

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I’m remembering this scene from the movie Eat Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert. Spoiler alert: If you haven’t seen/read it yet and want to preserve your innocence, stop reading now.

It came at a point when the main character — Julia Roberts playing Elizabeth Gilbert, who wrote the book the film was based on — was recognizing that she wasn’t happy in her marriage and in her life. She looked around and felt like she had no reason to be unhappy — she had it made by certain standards. A nice cushy life, a good man for a husband, friends, professional success, a nice home.

The fact remained — she was unhappy. Unlike her friends blissing out about the arrival of their long-desired baby, she didn’t dream of having a family. She kept a folder of travel destinations.

Then Liz/Julia has her “dear God, I’m in trouble” scene. It is the middle of the night. Her husband is asleep in another room. She’s as alone as she has ever been. She may have been crying.

She kneels, tentatively places her hands in prayer position, and whispers that line to a God she has neglected and disregarded. “Dear God, I’m in big trouble.”

At least that’s how I remember the scene. I thought it was well-played. How often do we get to witness these moments in others’ lives?

Dear God, I’m in big trouble. That thought surfaced into my conscious mind during a time of too-much-busyness several years ago. An inkling that I wasn’t happy managed to get through during a brief pause. Something was wrong, or maybe not wrong, just not right.

I had no idea what to do with that piece of information. I also became aware that I was exhausted.

I had what I believed was a good relationship with a good man. I had a good steady job, volunteered with a nonprofit helping women in prison, and was also was editing an anthology of women’s writing. I owned a charming vintage house close to downtown in an up-and-coming creative Austin neighborhood. I had spent a couple of years processing my major childhood trauma and felt most of it was behind me.

In some ways, I thought I had (finally) arrived.

Yet here was news of difference, an inner voice (was it me?) whispering to God: I’m in trouble. This isn’t my right life.

Did I have any idea what my right life was? No! It was just not the life I was living. Did I do anything about it? No. I had no clue what to do.

And shortly after that, the shit hit the fan in my relationship, I resigned from my volunteer work, and I hunkered down, feeling like a mess.

The Universe did for me what I couldn’t do for myself.

I withdrew more and more from the world and started meditating. I discovered that although I was in emotional pain, I was bigger than that. Much bigger.

That was my India.

It became clear that I needed to focus on taking care of my health. I got tested for food sensitivities and learned not only that I had too much candida, but also that I was sensitive to wheat, among a dozen other things.

I cleared the excess candida by rigorously following the prescribed diet. I learned to avoid wheat, and I felt so damn much better getting it out of my diet. (In hindsight, it was probably from glyphosate that had been sprayed on non-organic wheat. I was not sensitive to gluten.)

That was my Rome. Instead of stuffing my face and having to buy bigger jeans, I lost weight, but I felt so much better.

I have spent time on Maui twice since then, so maybe Maui is my Bali. II have plenty of shamans available, thank you very much. I’m still waiting for my Javier Bardem to appear.

All of that started several years ago, in 2007.

In hindsight, I recognize that overworking, overdoing, is one of the ways I have distracted myself from talking to God, higher power, Spirit, Source.

I recognize that that voice that talks to God is full of innocence and beauty and should never be ignored.

I recognize that when I am stuck, the Universe shifts to unstick me…and I don’t always have to wait for the Universe — I can create shifts myself, or at least the shifts I think I need…and find out later if they took me closer to God and “my right life.”

in a way, it’s like sailing, which is constant course-correcting.

I recognize that one of the ways to hear that voice more often, to get more familiar with it, to converse with it, is to make a habit of sitting in silence every day so I can hear it. Even if it’s just 10 minutes, that is time well spent, because it could be all that helps me be more centered in my authentic life.

Update: It’s 2023. I went through another big shift in late 2010, which led to me selling my house and starting career change from technical writer to bodyworker, and although there have been a few bumps in the road since then, I’m doing my right livelihood.

I’m aware that another shift is underway. It’s not exactly clear yet, but daily sitting in silence as well as asking for help from my higher self and feeling gratitude for all that is right in my life are walking me through this part of my journey.

Good article on samadhi

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Judith Hanson Lasater wrote this for Yoga Journal, and I think she did a great job of demystifying the last three limbs of Patanjali’s yoga.

I particularly like her contrast of the filter or grid that we ordinarily perceive reality through and the direct experience of reality — which no matter how it happens, through lovemaking or being alone in the woods or sitting on a zafu — always wakes us up to being more alive.

http://www.yogajournal.com/wisdom/461

Sitting and yoga, oh yeah, and breakthroughs

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Today I want to report on my sitting practice. I haven’t written much about it lately. If you’ve been keeping up, you’ll recall that I finally got serious about following my teacher’s instructions, to practice “whole body awareness”.

Today I crossed a threshold. Rather than being aware of my whole body, body awareness dropped more into the background, and whole awareness moved more into the foreground. And somehow they merged.

Maybe a better description for my experience is that for a few moments, “my body” was not me. There wasn’t really a me, an I, except for experiencing awareness. Sounds, body sensations, thoughts — all aspects of awareness, all one.

Okay, I know some of you may stumble upon this post and think this is crazy talk, that it doesn’t make any sense — unless you yourself have explored these realms of being.

You know what? It doesn’t make sense to me either! Making sense is where the trouble started! I am curious, so I will keep exploring.

I’m doing the best I can to describe in words something that is essentially a nonverbal experience.

Before sitting, I did yoga. We worked on Sun Salutations in yoga teacher training last night, each of us leading and innovating. It was very fun and a real workout! They’re like jazz — infinite variations are possible. Amazingly, I can lead a long improvised series of poses for the right side of the body– and remember the same sequence on the left! It just comes back to me.

So before yoga this morning, I did one l-o-n-g sun salutation, making each movement between the individual poses into a little vinyasa to repeat over and over, then HOLDING down dog, chaturanga, bhujangasana to build strength. I made a lovely stew of Iyengar and vinyasa today.

I’m working on a longer post about something the film Eat, Pray, Love triggered. When I work it through a bit more, I’ll post. It feels big!

More wonders of silence

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Just wanted to share a response from reader Loping Buzzard to my recent post, Wonders of Silence.

Great post! I really relate to the “grinding of the mind.” Following recent surgery, I began seriously meditating again after years of neglect. It took a couple of weeks to get back to the place I remember. And when I did, it was obvious. Suddenly, it was like everything stopped and I could HEAR so clearly. Where did that silence come from? Then I realized that the loud sound that was drowning out all others was coming from ME – that constant buzzing, grinding, roar. I was STILL for the first time in ages – not on the outside, on the inside. I was excited but worried that I couldn’t do it again, but with more practice, I can now do it within seconds. That familiar, still calm. And it has made a world of difference in my recovery.

What’s your story about the wonders of silence?